Chapman, Cameron. “Website Archives Design: Good Practices and Examples.” Smashing Magazine. Smashing Magazine GmbH. 24 May 2010. Web. 23 November 2014. <http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/24/website-archives-best-practices-and-showcase/>

This is an article written for Smashing Magazine, an extremely popular online magazine offering professional resources and advice to Web developers and Web designers. It was launched in 2006 by Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman. It has a very large audience and over 800,000 Twitter followers. The author of this article, Cameron Chapman, is a professional Web and graphic designer and journalist. She writes for a number of blogs such as Mashable and Smashing and she is the author of The Smashing Idea Book: From Inspiration to Application, a collection of inspirational designs, photos and web site looks.

While often website’s or blogs can be unreliable sources, Smashing magazine is a well established site aimed at professional web designers and people with some experience in the web design field. This article in particular seems aimed at individuals who already run a website and are looking at ways to improve their design and layout.

The article is broken up into three sections, the first examines common layouts for website archives, the second questions whether specific sites actually need archives and the third showcases some website’s with archives that the author thinks are particularly well designed or successful in their goals. The author puts particular emphasis on the fact that the archives should be spacious, concise and easy to use while still informative and encompassing all the information available on the site.

There is definitely a major bias in the article as it is all written from one individuals point of view regarding what she thinks are the most successful web designs. However I still think it is very interesting to read in regards to our project. Our project will include archiving a huge amount of data in a well designed, easy to use way and this article presents a lot of different, well researched examples regarding the different options available for doing this.

Another thing to take into consideration is that this article was written four years ago, as the internet moves so fast it means that much of the information could be outdated. However after reading the article I think some of it is still definitely relevant.

Although this article is biased to the authors personal taste I still think it’s something we should look at during our research. Her experience as a web designer gives her more authority on the issue’s she’s talking about and she draws from so many different websites that you really get a good overview of the different options available for web archiving.